Paul Miller

My colleague Michele Pelino and I published “The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms, Q4 2019” recently, and we’ll be discussing the findings in more detail in a webinar on January 30. It’s a complex space, where traditional industrial conglomerates, established enterprise software giants, networking and telecom providers, hyperscale cloud providers, global systems integrators, professional […]

Michele Pelino and I have been digging into Forrester Analytics’ Technographics® data, looking at big opportunities for the internet of things (IoT) — and identifying some of the consistent stumbling blocks to adoption. Michele and Frank Gillett have already done some great work here, updating documents such as “Internet-Of-Things Heat Maps For Operational Excellence, 2019” […]

The explosion of data in the IoT era has machinery designers taking a new look at how they use digital twins. Principal Analyst Paul Miller examines the trend.

Rolls-Royce began shifting its business model away from selling expensive metal, plastic, and carbon-fiber products (jet engines) toward delivering the service of miles flown way back in 1962. Now, with TotalCare, the company earns more than half of its revenues from delivery of a service, not sale of a product. Rolls-Royce is not alone. Its […]

I’ve written a lot about the ways in which traditional product makers are being transformed by digital. In “From Grease To Code: Industrial Giants Must Bet Their Futures On Software,” for example, I explored ways in which industrial firms are having to reinvent themselves as they augment a hundred years of experience making physical products […]

Why are IoT + blockchain success stories still so hard to find?

If you believe the stereotypes, then the worlds of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) are very different. In one, ranks of commoditized beige boxes hold institutional memory, critical intellectual property, and the bosses’ email: The data center is everything. In the other, proprietary, expensive, and arcane electromechanical monsters lurk next to the production […]

Back in August of last year, I asked for good examples of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality, and mixed reality (MR), all together known as extended reality. Unsurprisingly, I saw plenty of examples of the type my original post complained about: visually stunning but almost entirely useless for anything other than showing off. Then there […]

Koninklijke Philips has come a long way since the Philips family began making light bulbs in the Dutch city of Eindhoven in 1891. Today the company focuses on healthcare, but it wants to do more than just build and sell medical products. The Financial Times recently quoted Philips CEO Frans van Houten: “In the future, […]

The edge, and edge computing, figure prominently in a lot of internet of things (IoT) discussions right now. But where — and what — the edge is very quickly gets complicated. Telecom operators understand the edge of their network. Sellers of servers and gateways know what they’d like their customers to fill the edge with. Beneficiaries of […]

Africa is home to 20% of our planet’s land and 16% of its people, but none of the hyperscale public clouds run from data centers there — yet. Microsoft will offer Azure from data centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg later this year, and Amazon recently announced plans to follow suit with an Amazon Web Services […]

There’s a recurring assumption in discussions about internet of things (IoT) platforms: The platform providers make their money by mining insights from data loaded into their platform. They sell those insights back to the customer who put the data there in the first place and will also sell them to anyone else who can pay. […]

Multicloud is a real and increasingly strategic customer choice rather than an accident of poor or nonexistent planning. We all know that; I’ve written about it before. Vendors of cloud tools and solutions are clearly aware of the multicloud trend as well and are moving to position themselves to best advantage. But there’s a problem: For too […]

Multicloud is a real and increasingly strategic customer choice rather than an accident of poor or nonexistent planning. We all know that; I’ve written about it before. Vendors of cloud tools and solutions are clearly aware of the multicloud trend as well and are moving to position themselves to best advantage. But there’s a problem: […]

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have become the cool must-haves for industrial technology vendor keynotes. I have lost count of the times we’ve watched someone on stage as they swoosh and swoop through jet engines, nuclear reactors, sunken wrecks, and the like. We ooh and we ah, and then we wonder if these […]

I have written before about the ways industrial and manufacturing firms are reinventing themselves to become more efficient and better able to win, serve, and retain customers. Over the past few months, I have been working with my US-based colleague, Michele Pelino, to analyze the industrial IoT software platforms that are so central to this […]

Software platforms to support the industrial internet of things (IoT) are becoming very credible options. But despite their appeal, I constantly hear from clients who are wary. These clients don’t doubt the technical capabilities of the platform, or the pricing strategy, or the industrial nous of their preferred vendor. But they are confused about who […]

I have been working on a strand of research for about a year, delving into the ways that the internet of things (IoT), machine learning, augmented reality, and digital transformation affect traditional industrial firms, their partners, suppliers, competitors, and customers. There’s an awful lot more to come, but one significant report — From Grease To […]

In volatile market conditions, conservative industrial giants must move faster to survive. And this digital transformation of traditional manufacturing firms cannot — must not — simply be about making existing industrial processes more efficient. They must recognise the opportunity to use digital as a way to create more sustainable and profitable customer relationships, continuously aligning […]